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… and the weather bureau says it will continue through the evening. Tomorrow the sun is expected to shine on 4 to 5 inches of snow.

We took an experimental ride into the back country to see if it would be reasonably easy to get down the gravel roads to the house we saw yesterday… and we had no trouble getting there. Now we need an agent to show us the inside.

Here’s what it looks like with no snow:

Lots of gardening room!

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…and Elly says we could afford it. It’s out on a back road in Kearneysville, WV, with almost 2 acres of potentially gardenable land and a dozen or do mature apple trees (I grabbed an apple off one and it was yummy.)

Problems: smaller living space than we have now (future additions are possible) and lack of storage (we’re looking into the cost of a mobile storage unit rental prior to additions.)

Now we have to look into a few other things and maybe we’ll make an offer.

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“While people were pretty evenly split on whether the administration favors the middle class, the rich or the poor, they were all but unanimous about which class the Republicans favor; 69 percent said Republicans in Congress favor the rich, while just 9 percent said the middle class and 2 percent said the poor. That’s a significant perception problem for the GOP, and the Occupy Wall Street protesters — for whatever bad press they have created and will create due to the actions of some participants — are rallying support against the very class that the GOP is thought to favor.”

I’m not sure the GOP cares… nothing else that has been said, polled, complained about or done has gotten them to listen to the Middle Class that they started to disable with Reagan. The day one of those turkeys comes out to Tax The Rich and gets the Republican Party behind him (or her) is the day the world will end.

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As one who takes a large number of pills plus insulin shots every day, I have become extremely aware of the number of really serious prescription meds advertised on television. According to law, prescription meds have to reveal potential side effects in the ads (patent medicines don’t… although they may also have serious ones) and we are getting so used to hearing them that I think we have tuned out on what is being sold.

Thoughts of suicide, stroke, increased cholesterol, and even death are some of these announced side effects, but the drug companies drop them into the ads as if they are relatively unimportant. Since I have lately been thinking about the effects on foods of Monsanto‘s chemicals, these meds (a couple of which I take myself on doctors’ orders) seem to join the chemical dominance of life in the U.S.

While I want to see a healthy nation, I am very worried that we use dangerous chemical compounds more and more often, seemingly as much as a commitment to corporations as they are to curing or maintaining control over diseases. In some cases they are used where non-medication solutions were effective in the past.

A number of political economists and business authorities are predicting that a 9%-10% unemployment rate has become the norm and will remain so for at least the next generation. And what has caused this? The banks? The politicians? The President (or the preceding presidents?)

Perhaps it is none of the above… perhaps it is the mix of our inventiveness, technology and and our growing productivity.

Think about this: we make more and more automobiles, with more advanced engines and technical attributes, but we use less and less employees to manufacture them. Through the use of advanced robotics we have taken what used to be thousands of workers on the assembly lines and replaced them with hundreds. That means 90% of previous employees are no longer necessary due to our technical advances… and more of these are coming. What if the hundred worker line becomes the ten worker line? It’s not only possible, it’s likely.

I heard someone on television ask “When was the last time you dealt directly with a bank teller?” The answer, of course, is that with debit cards and ATM machines, we handle our own deposit activities, get our own cash, check our balances, etc. Do we wonder, then, why the number of bank employees have fallen off?

The people in retail stores who used to mark items with price tags have been replaced by preprinted bar codes which are scanned at checkout counters to connect with computer listed prices. And now, in grocery stores for instance, there is a marked increase in checkout lines where you do the bar code scanning yourself, replacing the cash register employee. In my supermarket, eight checkout lines are now customer scanned and are observed and approved by one employee at the end of the aisle, thus eliminating seven cash register employees. As the self-checkout system grows, fewer and fewer cash register lines are even lit up and open… this almost forces many people into the self-checkout so they don’t wait in a long line.

The one set of industries that would employ larger numbers of people… construction, both on housing and in repairing our highways, bridges and infrastructure… is being ignored by Congress in an obvious and serious political confrontation with the President. By voting down the Jobs act (or not letting it come into being) there is no support for this help to Americans and their country.

Then there are teachers, firemen and police officers, all who have faced extreme layoffs due to budget cuts after tax income has been reduced due to increased unemployment. There are smaller towns that have eliminated their police departments altogether, if you can believe that. Schoolrooms now have larger and less teachable classes in order to cope with less teachers… and the academic achievements of our children have diminished accordingly. We are becoming both poorer and less educated at the same time.

If there is a solution to all of this… if there is a response other than absolute anger, as the Occupy movements are showing… I don’t know what it is.

This is a new America which we must find a way of dealing with. I’m not sure we will in the near future.

Here is a rather long video with a French and Canadian co-creation, and it deals with how Monsanto markets their chemical products to farms, etc. Take a look:

UPDATE:

After watching “The World According to Monsanto,” I saw significant proof of the company’s lies, ethical violations, manipulation, bullying and significant health destruction world wide. I hope you take the hour and 3/4 it takes to watch this and then get back to me to discuss what we can do to protect ourselves, our children and out food.

If we don’t act now, it becomes harder and harder to turn the hazard of RoundUp Ready Crops around; to eliminate bovine hormones in our milk, cheese, ice cream; to prevent Monsanto from taking control of the world’s food supply.

In the last couple of days there have been protests in Washington DC against Monsanto. Their grasp on the balls of our politicians and the amount of money they spend on controlling the FDA and the EPA is outrageous.

Some suggestions:

1. Let local restaurants, school cafeterias and grocery stores know that the community is not happy to have GMO contaminated foods in their establishments…

We played the Ted Conference piece by Robyn O’Brien on poisoning in food. It led me to research more about Monsanto and the chemical poisoning all our food which they are carrying out through government manipulation and media control.

… and I had a hard time finding a place to park to get into the radio show this morning. Alumni were wandering in clumps all around German Street and many were starting to head for the Stadium for the football game.

Of course, with all of this the Football guys were late getting into the studio and I had to stick around after my show to make sure they got into the studio.

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The President scored another foreign policy day following the demise of Qaddafi… All US troops are coming home from Iraq ASAP.

The major reason is that the Iraqi government would not extend immunity from legal prosecution to US Troops if they stayed as trainers… therefore Obama is pulling them out. Relations between Iraq and America are now turned over to the State Department.

Obama’s successes in foreign policy (especially in the past year as he completed goals that the Bush administration couldn’t get to over two terms… notably the ends of Qaddafi and Bin Laden), although played down and ignored by Republicans, puts him in a position of leadership many didn’t expect. Of course, the Republicans are going to find away to play this down as well.

If we credit the Bush Administration with anything, why not the almost 4,500 military deaths in Iraq (and over 39,000 permanent injuries)?

I’m interested in what the debating clowns say next Tuesday when their topic is supposed to be Foreign Policy.

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Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed today in a gunfight in his hometown of Sirte after a prolonged struggle, the interim Libyan government said, thus ending once and for all the rule Qaddafi had held since 1969.

Four decades of Qaddafi’s control of the oil-rich country led to advanced weapon development which was later abandoned, grizzly murders of opponents, responsibility for airplane bombings and the creation of a cartoon-styled identity used to present himself to the rest of the world.

He became the longest serving Arab or African dictator, outlasting his early contemporaries such as Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Gamel Nasser, yet he never believed that the Libyans, in the last couple of years, had turned against him.

Apparently he was wounded in the fire fight and died later in the ambulance. One of his sons died as well.

The best news to me is that we didn’t do it!

The world now watches to see what will happen in Libya as it reconstructs itself.

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I stopped into a Weis supermarket, a place where I don’t normally shop. Elly needed a bottle of Advil, and as I was looking for the Pharmacy aisle, I walked by the meats rack… and there, in all it’s glory, was Gaspar’s Linguica!

Gaspar’s Linquica is a Portuguese sweet sausage which, if you ever lived on Cape Cod or in New Bedford, MA, or anywhere in a hundred mile range of North Dartmouth, MA, you would have accepted as one of the ordinary joys of life.

It’s only after you move far away… say to Shepherdstown, WV… that you realize what you have lost. Elly and I have searched stores for years to see if anyone carried this most delicious meat product with no luck. But finding it today gives me hope for peace and prosperity in the world.

“As to what to do for the housing industry, specifically, and are there things that you could do to encourage housing: One is, don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom. Allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up. And let it turn around and come back up.”

I need your help to keep Under The LobsterScope going… but I never take your contributions without making it worth your while:

1. I present a blog that keeps you up to date on politics and the arts… and lots of things you don’t find anywhere else…

and

2. For every donation of $5.00 or more I am now offering 2 special fonts – real designer’s treasures which sell for $29.00 each – for your computer design and publishing efforts:Bill’s Asterisks and Bullets and Bill’s Ampersands (see samples below.)

Neat, hey? From graphic designers to desktop publishers, these two fonts will be in use all the time. So, for a donation of $5.00 or more they are yours. Offer ends on Sunday Oct. 23.

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Bill Tchakirides

Would you believe that this old man in West Virginia was once a Broadway Producer, or a Commercial Food Photographer, or a Justice of the Peace, or a Font Designer, or even a Director of a major non-profit Arts Program on Cape Cod? Well, he was. Now he spends most of his time posting in the blogosphere and looking for things to do (retirement is a bitch).
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A note about YOUR COMMENTS. I accept comments from all sides... but I reserve the right to eliminate comments with offensive (to me) language and comments which promote causes or situations I believe to be criminal or worse. Also, please limit your comments to no more than three insertions... I'm less than thrilled with the same argument on any subject repeated more than three times. Continued posts complaining about me or my views without presenting a polite argument will get you on my Spam list.

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I am a Liberal

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.
What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor."
-- Matt Santos, The West Wing